


27 Years of Forgetting

by the_original_starfruit



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: 50's kids, :))), Boys In Love, M/M, Mutual Pining, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Sexuality Crisis, Sorry about that by the way, The Kids™, The Loser's Club - Freeform, based entirely off the book cause i haven't seen the movie yet, friendship and adventure, honestly i love pure kids but apparently i love suffering more, i read that whole fuckin book in three days lemme tell U
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2019-04-05 15:09:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14046936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_original_starfruit/pseuds/the_original_starfruit
Summary: If you had told eleven-year-old Richie Tozier he would forget Eddie Kaspbrak, he would have laughed in your face. If you had told thirty-eight-year-old Richie Tozier that he had already forgotten Eddie Kaspbrak, he would have looked at you blankly and said, "Who?"People tend to forget when they move away from Derry, Maine - but roots will always be remembered, eventually.A love story, told in seven parts.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hello lovely humans !! some stuff before we begin: 
> 
> \- this is based entirely off the book, which unfortunately means that in order to be faithful to the characters i had to write some shit like kids using slurs and being racist,,,, i'm sorry they are problematic 50's children
> 
> \- some sprinklings of dialogue are borrowed directly from the book, so extra disclaimer: i don't own anything, this is purely for fun with zero profit, eddie kaspbrak is gay and stephen king is a coward (bonus points if you can find the dialogue i used :O)
> 
> \- this was originally written as a oneshot, but it got hella long so the chapters might be short // broken up oddly because they were meant to be installments 
> 
> \- s/o to my beta reader // editor she is fantastic and a love and i wouldn't have carried through writing this without her
> 
> \- specific trigger warnings on specific chapters, so heed the notes please !!
> 
> \- enjoy !!!

The day Richie Tozier meets Eddie Kaspbrak, he doesn’t even come close to realizing that he is, for lack of a better term, completely and utterly fucked.

            He sees Bill, waiting for him outside the Aladdin; they’re going to see _The Blob,_ which, from what Richie’s heard, is about some crazy monster that nobody can kill. The late afternoon sun sprawls across the street, as thick as melted butter. He starts walking faster, nearing a trot, a big grin spreading across his face, and that’s when Bill shifts, noticing Richie in return, and there’s someone else standing behind him.

            “Ah, Stuttering Bill, paragon of theater, leader of moviegoers, holder of the tickets,” A Voice tumbles out, a sort of snotrockety Olde English Voice, and he rolls with it, “a pleasure to gander at the picture show on this fine, fine afternoon. However, my eyes see a stranger in our mist –“ Richie is pretty sure it’s _mist,_ but he doesn’t know, so he drops the Voice – “who the hell’s this loser?”

            The boy is tiny; Richie has a good six inches on him, and Bill maybe eight. His wrists are as thin around as baby bird bones, Richie thinks, and they look too fragile to be for real. His legs are long and knockingly skinny, and the shorts that balloon out over them are held up with a belt cinched laughably tight around his waist. He looks up at Richie and then tentatively back at Bill, absolutely nonplussed, and then hacks out a brief cough into his elbow. Bill grins.

            “This is Eh-Eh-Eddie Kaspbrak,” he says, “and l-luh-luh-lay off for a minute. I w-wanted to take h-h-him ‘cause he’s never buh-buh-been to a monster muh-muh-muh – “

            Richie can practically feel his face light up with incredulous malice.

 _“Never been to a monster movie?”_ he repeats, and Eddie’s eyes flick up to his. They’re reluctant now, halfway embarrassed but reaching for indignant instead.

            “Yeah,” Eddie says, “I don’t go to the movies that often. The theater’s full of dust.”

“He’s got uh-uh-u-uh-“ Bill screws up his face, concentrating, “ _Asthma.”_

Richie grins, but before he can make a wiseass remark, he sees the scowl on Eddie’s face, and the sight of the two neat wrinkles falling primly on either side of his nose make something in him soften.

            “Well!” Richie says, in something that’s not quite a Voice but not quite _his_ voice either, “If you faint in there, you’ll have Richie Tozier to carry you out. Sworn to serve all young maidens - the Round Table’s very finest.” He leans forward and pinches Eddie’s cheek, watching the pale skin flush a deep pink.

            “Wha – ugh, God, get _off_ me!” Eddie cries, slapping at his hand, and Richie concedes with a wide smile. He sidesteps Eddie in favor of Bill’s other side, and grabs his elbow, affecting a lady on the arm of her partner.

            “Sorry, Eds. You got my ticket, Denbrough? Time runneth short.”

“Ruh-ruh-right here. You owe m-me a c-c-quarter,” Bill says, pulling three paper stubs from his pocket. Eddie is still staring at Richie, his cheeks pink, mouth slightly agape.

            “Wh – d – don’t call me _Eds!”_ he says, his voice a mixture of indignation and incredulity that makes Richie’s smile feel all amped-up, like five hundred watts have just been flicked on somewhere behind his face.

            “Leave some stutters for Stuttering Bill, Eds, they suit him better. Whattaya say, then, Edward – Red-Faced Ed? Eddie Spaghetti? The potential for nicknames here is huge!”

            Richie is only able to shut his trap when Bill jostles his arm, giving a light punch to his shoulder.

            “Luh-luh-lay _off_ , Richie. You know they’ll k-k-kick us out if y-yuh-you’re loud the whole tuh-time.”

            Richie sighs dramatically and falls behind Bill. “My natural talent – Killed! Murdered! Squelched!”

Eddie is still looking at him like he has two heads, his sandy eyebrows all wrinkled up. His eyelashes are long, and Richie glows under the look Eddie’s giving him through them; it’s the face of a boy trying to piece together a puzzle he doesn’t understand. He smiles again, knowing by how wide his mouth is stretching that he looks like a doofus, but he doesn’t care. He’s happy.

Richie sweeps the door open for Eddie with a bow and holds it wide, reveling in the familiar blast of stale, popcorn-scented air. As Bill goes inside, Eddie hesitates in the doorway, appears to steel himself, and sticks his hand out, a reluctant invitation hanging in the space between them.

“Nice to meet you,” he says, and Richie hesitates before he grabs Eddie’s hand. It’s small and warm, with such short, meticulous nails, and both their palms are a little sweaty. They shake once.

Then Richie’s mouth opens on its own, and Eddie is so perfectly teasable that he just can’t help himself.

“Whoa, nice manners, Eds! Your mom taught you well – it’s a shame she didn’t show me the same consideration last ni –“

Eddie snatches his hand back with a furious little _“oh!”,_ Richie cackles at his own wit, and Bill yanks them both inside, shutting the door on the bright reality of the afternoon.

And if Richie takes care to sit next to Eddie, to shove his seat slightly during the scary parts and feel panicky fingers clutching at his arm in the darkness of the theater, that’s nobody’s business but his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please comment if you have an extra minute i'm insecure and you'll validate my existence


	2. Chapter 2

The day Eddie comes over for a game of Parcheesi, Richie realizes they’re best friends.

It’s a monumentally foul day, unusually cold for summer and pouring rain. Not in the wild, chaotic summer-thunderstorm way where you can have fun running around in the streets, either. It’s dismal, constant, and deeply unpleasant, the kind of rain that makes wallpaper dampen and swell and the bottoms of your feet itch in a maddening way.

Richie yanks up the hood of his sweatshirt, feeling the rain slowly wet the fabric through. He’s standing outside the arcade, plucking at the lint in his moneyless pockets and listening wistfully to the shouts and crashes coming from inside. Bill would’ve lent him fifty cents, but then Bill had crapped out on him and Stan and Eds – something about ignoring chores and his mom making him do them all today. Bunch of sissy stuff, if you asked Richie. Hopefully Stan would be here soon; he might be Jewish, but Richie isn’t entirely sure that means he can’t borrow a half-dollar.

“Hey,” a dejected voice says, and Richie looks up to see one Eddie Kaspbrak, swaddled in a tightly zipped slicker, a pair of yellow gumrubber boots on his feet, with a huge umbrella held over his head to boot. Richie starts to grin.

“Hey hey! It’s our man Eddie ‘Hurricane’ Kaspbrak, coming at us _live_ from his brave station in the middle of a monsoon, just look at all that gear he has to wear to survive! Eddie, tell the folks back home, how _do_ you do it and what _is_ the weather?”

“Beep-beep, Richie,” Eddie says, tilting his umbrella so some extra water drips on Richie’s head. He shakes like a sheepdog, feeling his wet hair fly out in every direction as his hood comes down. “Where’s Bill?”

“Ther’w’s some…trouble at Denbrough’s place,” Richie says, imagining a Brooklyn gangster type, tipping an invisible hat and slouching one side of his mouth to let the Voice roll out. “Been slackin’ on some of his… _duties._ The big broad in cha’age down there ain’t pleased, n’now he’s payin’ the price.” He lowers his voice so Eddie has to lean in to hear it over the rain. _“Doin’ time.”_

Eddie seems to deflate.

“Well, Stan called and said he can’t come either, his mom’s dragging him down to some family party in Bangor that he didn’t know about ‘till today.”

            Richie honestly tries to be disappointed at this killing blow to their plans, but the prospect of a whole day tormenting Eddie looks almost as good as one spent shouting and trying to beat his old skeeball record. 

“Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes, Eds. Hey, how much cold hard cash did you happen to bring? Two can still have a good time, _especially_ when one of those two is Richie Tozier. Promise I’ll treat ya right.”

            Eddie hesitates, looking mildly disgusted at the prospect, then digs around in his pocket. He pulls out two pennies, a nickel, and a dime.

            “Seventeen cents won’t do much,” he says, his shoulders slumping under his raincoat. “Do you have anything?”

            Richie shakes his head, shrugs, and spins on one heel, as if to walk away and leave Eddie in the rain.

            “Well, guess the arcade’s out then. Seeya around, Eds, give your mom my love!”

Richie sees Eddie blink twice, fast, out of the corner of his eye, and then the rain on his head stops, replaced by the _tap-tapping_ of drips on an umbrella.

            “Wait up, asshat! Just because we can’t do the arcade doesn’t mean we can’t still do _something_ ,” and Richie is glowing, hoping the triumph in his eyes is hidden by the fogging of his glasses.

            “Can’t get enough of the Trashmouth!” he crows, jumping ahead, and Eddie rolls his eyes.

            “Don’t worry, I’ll have had my fill pretty soon,” he snarks back, and then jams the umbrella into Richie’s hand. “Hold this, dipshit. You’re gonna get pneumonia if you keep running around in the rain with your head all wet.”

            “No worries, Eds. When I get sick I’m sure you’ll be at my bedside, nursing me faithfully until I finally expire.”

            Eddie shudders at the prospect.

“No thanks. I’ll leave you to die in your germs that I wasn’t dumb enough to catch.”

            Richie shoves the umbrella back at Eddie, then grabs him by one skinny wrist and gives a good lick to the cold palm of his open hand.

            _“RICHIE!”_ Eddie shrieks, and Richie cackles.

“Germs, germs, germs, Kaspbrak! Spitty shitty germs!” He wiggles his fingers at Eddie, who sticks his hand out from under the umbrella and then furiously wipes the wet off on every part of Richie he can reach.

            “Ugh, let’s go to your house. It’s closer than mine and I need to sanitize my hand before I punch your dumb face with it.”

            “Ah, it’s too bad,” Richie sighs, wistful, and Eddie looks around, anger softening into curiosity, “if we were going to your house, I could have sanitized your mo –“

            Eddie shoves him so hard he stumbles into a deep gutterpuddle, and Richie retaliates with an enormous stomp, feeling an inch of cold water ooze out of his sneakers. Soon they’re both drenched in mud and rain, racing down the streets until Eddie has to stop, hacking and wheezing, to take a pull at his inhaler.

            When they get to Richie’s house, faces pink and raw, they kick off their shoes and socks by the back door and stumble into the kitchen. Richie notices that Eddie is visibly shivering when he takes off his raincoat.

            “Hey, Richie,” Eddie says through the chitter of his teeth, “could I borrow something dry to wear? Mom’ll kill me if I get a cold.”

            “Sure thing, Eds. Lemme see if I have anything that hasn’t been sitting in a pile of my germs for a few months now.”

            _“Don’t_ call me Eds, Richie –“ and they stampede up the creaking stairs to Richie’s room, a wild chase that ends in raspy breath and a borrowed outfit.

            They play Parcheesi at the kitchen table, sweet Nilla wafers dissolving in cold glasses of milk, the rain sheeting relentlessly outside. Eddie looks so small in Richie’s sweatpants with the cuffs rolled up, his normally neat hair drying in wisps and cowlicks, and Richie is suddenly swamped by a completely unexpected wave of affection. His chest is free and easy, loose and warm, and he thinks _this is what best friends feel for each other._

            The warmth quickly turns to annoyance when Eddie sets up another blockade. _Smugly_.

“Sorry, Eds. It’s actually a rule that three blockades in a row sends three of your little bastards back home.”

Eddie just laughs.

“Yeah, in your dreams, you sore loser. Hand over the dice.”

            Richie makes his eyes wide and earnest and a little bit frustrated behind his glasses.

“No, I’m serious! It’s in the rules!”

            He and Eddie glare for a second, then make a simultaneous grab for the instruction manual. Pieces go flying, and in the scuffle Richie manages to sweep his arm across the table, overturning the board and obliterating Eddie’s completely unfair success.

            “My _elephants!”_ Eddie cries, and the anguish in his voice is enough to stop Richie dead. They stare at each other, a split second of hands on arms and stomachs digging into the hard edge of the table, and then, for no reason at all, they both collapse into peals of laughter.

            _“No,_ not – not ze _elephants,_ señor,” Richie chokes out in what is barely a Voice, and Eddie is slumped over the table, gasping for breath, his hand still closed around Richie’s wrist.

            The delirious warmth washes back over him, and he thinks again _this must be my best friend. ‘Cause that’s what this is – being able to laugh and feel all warm like this when you don’t even know what’s funny._

            Eddie stays for dinner, even though they stop playing Parcheesi after that, and Richie gets a fever and a head cold two days later. Though Eddie, as promised, doesn’t come to nurse him back to health, Richie lies in bed thinking of an umbrella held over them both and rain, pattering, pattering.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i live for comments


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw and apology:
> 
> \- racism 
> 
> \- somewhat graphic descriptions of violence
> 
> \- blood

The day the Loser’s Club meets for the first real time, after all seven of them come out banged up but alive from the rockfight, Richie realizes they’re in real danger.

            The July sun is downright oppressive, glinting off chips of mica in the gravel pit and sending heat lines like lazy snakes baking and wavering up off the train tracks. The sky is full and drowsy, a couple of cicadas shrilling and dogs barking from far away, and under it all, they sense more than hear the low babble of the Kenduskeag and the verdant hum of the Barrens. The air between the six of them is crackling with energy – they’re going to set off some firecrackers, and it’s gonna be fuckin’ _awesome_. But through it all, Richie keeps looking around, looking between their faces – Ben, Bill, Stan, Bev, Eddie – troubled by something unknown, a sense of incompleteness that nags at him as persistently as his mom telling him to wash behind his ears. It’s strange – like someone is missing who they’ve never met.

            It’s in the middle of all this energy, this strange crackling loss, when Bill frowns, stops, drops the firecrackers, and orders them to start collecting rocks. _Ammo._ Richie looks up at him, incredulous, and then sees a disturbance on the top edge of the gravel pit – a kid, running hell-bent for leather, who is half-falling, half-scrambling down to them. A black kid. Absurdly, Richie’s thoughts trumpet out in his pickaninny Voice – _Whatchoo runnin from, boi? Whassup theah? You gon’ get a whuppin? –_ and then the kid is there, bleeding from six different places, panting, tears of fear or maybe anger coursing clean lines through the shmuck on his face.

            “Help,” the kid coughs out, “Kids – big kids –“

And Richie takes his glasses off, folding them safely into his pocket as Henry Bowers and his four cronies approach, and after that – well, it’s kind of a blur.

            He’s aware of them talking almost-pleasantries at first, _hand over the prisoner n’none of y’all get hurt_. A couple seconds in and talking turns to yelling and finally the rocks are flying, missiles filling the air like a flock of demented birds, and oh boy wouldn’t Stan love that, Richie shoots a look and sees Stan’s face twisted up in something completely unlike his normal bookish self, dangerous, curly hair flying all to hell as he whips rocks out with the practiced and somehow delicate wrist of a boy skipping stones. Peter Gordon turns and flees, tail between his legs as Ben clips him a good one on the face, _nice one, Haystack,_ Bill is charging at that big dumb box of bricks Moose, and Richie joins him, feeling savage pleasure when one of his rocks splits the place above the big boy’s eyebrow and Moose howls, _there, how’d’ya like that you yellow-bellied fucking dirtsnake, one on five that’s really a fair fight_. Richie’s brain is whizzing, high up above it all, ducking rocks and throwing them in a kind of dance, and in slow motion he sees Bev stumble as she catches one in the arm, Stan and Eddie come up from behind to join Richie and Bill and that’s good good good, Richie feels pride burst in him at the sight of his two quietest friends all alight, savage, hurling rocks and obscenities with the best of them. Ben bonks a big one off the back of Henry’s head and takes him down again, but then Victor Criss is coming up, hammy hands full of quartz and an apelike thunder on his brow, and he’s hurling rocks with much more precision than anyone expects, and then Richie sees Eddie’s head whip back and he goes down, _shaboom, ka-zam,_ just like magic folks, there and gone, and there’s blood, so much fucking blood.

            Richie turns to sprint to Eddie and sees Ben do the same thing. Cold fear is crawling squeamishly up his throat, and he ignores the rock that goes singing past his leg, but Eddie’s already getting up again, crying hard with eyes like wet fire, hand pressed to his bright scarlet-streaming chin.

            _Attaboy, Eds, nobody takes you down,_ he thinks wildly, and turns back around towards the fray, hand clenched with panicky tightness around his last rock, and then something slams his chest with such force there isn’t even pain at first, only a walloping numbness that robs the breath from his lungs. Richie tries to cough, eyes bulging, unable to suck air in or push out anything but a weak little _uugghh._

 _This is how Eds feels without his ass-pirator,_ Richie’s brain supplies suddenly, and he stands straight again, _forcing_ the air back in and out of his stupid-shocked lungs even though some of his ribs might be broken and he knows a god-awful bruise is gonna be there later.

            “ _Take this, you dumb shit!”_ Richie screams in an odd choked voice, and hurls his last rock with all the force he can muster. Victor ducks easily.

            Then something odd happens: Vic strikes Bill on the cheek, drawing blood, and suddenly the rest of the fight evaporates and stills, Bill and Vic walking towards each other like gunslingers in an old Western, flinging rocks at a speed even Richie struggles to keep up with. Then Vic is out of ammo, Bill stutters something out with deadly quiet, and a few seconds longer is all it takes for Vic to be scuttling backwards and away like some ugly crab, up over the edge of the gravel pit and out of sight.

            They all know the fight is over then, with seven of theirs to only three of Henry’s, but the jackass stays a little longer anyway and hurls some lame insults before he’s finally driven away. Richie catches his breath.

            “You’re gonna wish you didn’t cross Henry, kid,” Belch says thickly to Bill, nursing a pretty good cut lip, and there’s malice in his words but no power. “C’mon, Moose.” They scrabble up the edge of the pit, trying not to look back over their shoulders.

            Richie feels a kind of primal satisfaction under his aching chest – _you attack cave, we beat ass –_ before his attention is drawn to Eddie’s whooping half-breaths behind him. Ben starts to go towards Eddie, taking peculiar, mincing little steps, but before he breaks out into a run for the bushes Richie understands the green tinge in his face. Bev swipes some blood from her face and goes to Eddie instead, hooking an arm around his waist, and Richie follows.

            Eddie is quaking like a leaf, thin chest heaving, and Richie puts a tentative hand flat on his back. He can feel the small ridges of Eddie’s bones, and the heat radiating through his shirt is almost feverish. Richie digs around in his pocket until his fingers close around the plastic of the aspirator he keeps for occasions like this. He sticks the end in Eddie’s mouth.

            “Bite on this, Eddie,” he says, and he knows why Bev looks up in surprise – because even to his own ears Richie’s voice is softer than he’s ever heard it. He pulls the trigger and relief floods him as Eddie gasps painfully. Slowly, his breaths return to a healthier rhythm, and his chest stops shaking.

            “Thanks,” he finally manages, and Richie shoves the aspirator into his hands and puts his glasses back on. Bev stands up with a nod and goes to Ben when he comes out of the bushes, and Richie is all alone with Eddie, looking with some fascination at the blood still waterfalling down his chin.

            “We oughta clean that up,” he hears himself say, and Eddie looks up in surprise. His eyes look very green.

            “Well, yeah, numbnuts,” Eddie says, startling a laugh out of Richie. “What d’you think I carry around a first-aid kit for?”

            Eddie is reaching into the pocket of his cargo shorts, pulling out alcohol wipes, gauze, tape, bandages. Richie looks at this minute hospital setup gleaming whitely on the dusty gravel and starts to snicker, his laughter bubbling up more insistently when Eddie fixes him with a reproachful glare.

            “Shut _up,_ Richie, you won’t be laughing when that cut on your arm gets infected and you die of blood poisoning,” but this only makes Richie snort harder. Eddie swipes the blood off his chin, hissing at the sting, and holds the pad there long enough to staunch the flow.

            “Here, let me,” Richie says when Eddie reaches for the Band-Aids, “you can’t see your own chin, dumbass.” Eddie looks up at him, inscrutable, before nodding. He tilts his chin up and forward, eyes closed. His eyelashes brush and flutter.

 _He looks like a girl in a chick-flick waiting to be kissed,_ Richie thinks, and maybe that odd yet simple thought is what drives him to put one hand on Eddie’s cheek, fingers gentle behind his ear. The hair there is soft and fine.

            Then Eddie’s eyes fly open, question marks written all over his face, and Richie snaps out of whatever weird trance _that_ was, opening the Band-Aid with slightly shaking fingers. He plasters it on over the long but shallow cut, using the pad of his thumb to wipe away the fresh blood that had welled up during the strange in-between.

            “Thanks, but I’ll pass on your dirty fingers next time,” Eddie says, standing up and stuffing his first-aid kit back into his pockets.

            “Oh, you say that, Eddie Spaghetti, but your old pal Richie knows the truth. You want these dirty fingers _aaaaalllll_ over y –“

            “Beep-beep, Richie,” Eddie and Stan say at the same time, and they all laugh for a second, even the new kid, his rather lovely smile shining very white against his face.

            They introduce themselves, and the odd feelings of loss and adrenaline are replaced by a newer, simpler feeling – completion – and this new feeling frightens Richie in its very rightness, because the rightness is absolutely foreign and unknown. Mike. Seven.

            _Seven’s a number of power,_ Richie thinks, unbidden, and his eyes meet Bill’s, where they find the same troubling rightness, the same uncertainty in certainty.

            He looks at the Band-Aid wrinkled up on Eddie’s chin, and fear ripples through him like some kooky doctor just injected icewater into his stomach.

            _We’re all in danger,_ the thought says, again unbidden and unfamiliar on this blazing July afternoon, _but whatever the fuck is out there, I’m not letting it get Eddie. That’s all I know – is that I’m not letting this thing touch Eddie._

            He startles at his own realization, brow crinkling, and then they’re moving again, resuming their firecrackers plus Mike like the rockfight never happened. Richie is struck again by that odd, powerful rightness, but then he tries to leave troubling thoughts in the dust, pasting a grin on his face that turns a little more genuine when Bill hands him the first firecracker.

            “Shuh-shuh-shoot her off, R-R-Richie,” he says, and the afternoon goes up in a spark and a bang and a fizz of bright smoke.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heyo kudos are great but you know what's better ? comments cause then i can improve my writing n share more with you guys !!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for:
> 
> \- serious internalized homophobia
> 
> \- regular old homophobia
> 
> \- slurs

 

            The day Eddie holds onto him for the first time, Richie starts to realize he’s not _like_ other boys.

The seven of them had gathered in the Barrens earlier that morning, cracking jokes, talking, and half-playing a game of Monopoly that is lying, abandoned, on the dirt floor of the clubhouse. The air is brutally hot and humid enough to cut with a knife. Richie looks at Stan, who is listening for birds through the hatch (thrown open in the hopes of catching a nonexistent breeze), but the woods all around them are silent as the grave. Conversation and willingness to move have evaporated like morning fog on a sunny day.

            Eddie, sitting next to Bill across the circle from Richie, pulls uncomfortably at the armpits of his shirt. His pale face is flushed with the heat, hectic roses blooming high up on his cheeks. Bev keeps fidgeting: re-crossing her ankles, reaching back every few seconds to move her hair off her neck. Ben looks monumentally uncomfortable in his baggy hoodie, sweat making his face taut and shiny.

            So when Richie groans and flops against the wall, scattering pink paper money and properties into his friends’ laps, nobody has the energy to be angry; only Stan makes a halfhearted sound of protest.

            “Ah say, ah say it’s toooooo _hawt,_ boy,” he sighs in a Southern Gentleman Voice that lacks even its usual mediocre panache.

            “Yeah,” Ben agrees, wilting and listless, and then Mike is jumping to his feet. A Monopoly trinket crunches under his shoe, and everyone sits up, blinking as if startled from sleep.

            “C’mon, guys, this is bull. Let’s go swimming at the Quarry.”

Richie sits up. _Take that,_ he thinks at nobody in particular, _‘round here we ain’t beat, we beat the heat._

            “Ah knew, ah say ah _knew_ we kept this boy around for a reason,” he says, and his Voice rolls out reinvigorated.

            “We keep Mike around ‘cause he’s a genius. You’re right, but I definitely wouldn’t say the same about you,” Eddie says, grinning when Bev snorts at the dig.

            “Zing! Pow!” Richie says, half-sarcastic, “Eddie Kaspbrak gets off a _good_ one for sure.”

Everyone gets up, albeit more slowly than Mike, stretching and shaking out limbs that have fallen asleep in the midsummer doze. Bill boosts Eddie out the hatch after Bev and Ben have already climbed up, and Richie yanks Stan up from the floor.

            “C’mon, Stan my man, whatchoo, whatchoo say? C’mon up off that floor, the Quarry’ll run and hide if we’re too slow!”

            Stan laughs, even as he shakes Richie’s hand from his arm and fastidiously straightens his shirt.

            “What are you even _talking_ about?” he asks, a bit too fond to be really bewildered, and they clamber up from the small cool pocket of the underground into the suffocation up above.

            “C-c-cuh-c’mon,” Bill says once Ben has flipped the hatch back over, leaving no trace of their clubhouse except a faint line in the earth. They all start walking slowly, single file until Richie gooses Ben, who gives a rather high-pitched shriek and starts a Six-People-On-Trashmouth chase, his face cranberry red.

            When they stop under the Kissing Bridge, Richie throws his hands up in surrender.

“Oh please sir, oh man, I was only havin’ a little fun, a little water under the bridge, a little of the ol’ grab-ass on a fine afternoon –“

            “Beep-beep, Richie,” Ben puffs out. He swipes an arm across his forehead as Bill yanks Silver out from under the struts and starts to wheel up the slope, and Mike follows suit with his own bike. Richie grabs his as well, and the group makes its way up to the road, where Richie immediately shoves his handlebars into Bev’s hands.

            “You can take my bike, Bev baby, I’m gonna catch a ride with my old reliable Denbrough here –“

            But Bill is shaking his head, a smirk on his face.

“A-a-after thuh-that chase? N-no thuh-thuh-thanks, Trashmouth. I’ll r-ruh-ride someone duh-duh-double who won’t kuh-kuh-kill me w-when I’m n-n-not luh-looking.”

            Richie scowls as Stan steps up, almost shyly, and clambers with some awkwardness onto the seat behind Bill. Bill smiles at him, and Richie mimes retching into the street.

“I won’t kill you whether you’re looking or not,” Stan says helpfully, and Richie shoots him a fake glare, mouthing _we’ll settle this later_ behind Bill’s back. He makes grabbing gestures at Bev, asking for his bike back, and then bellows out with the nasal intonation of a fairground hawker.

            “Allllllright, allllright then, who’s up for Richie’s Rides, a fun-filled, crazy dash through the streets? No guarantee you’ll come out alive, but hey! Where’s the fun in life without a little risk?”

Bill rolls his eyes and starts to jerk Silver’s pedals, Stan clinging tightly to his shoulders. They gain momentum, smoothing out the wobbles, and disappear from sight, Bill’s shout of _“Hi-yo, Silver!”_ ringing from some distance down the street.

“Hey, uh, do you want to walk with me, Beverly?” Ben asks, hopeful, the red returning to his face for a reason Richie thinks is beyond the sun beating down on the pavement. Bev favors him with a mischievous smile and pushes the bike back towards Richie.

“Sure, since Richie’s bike was such a short-time loan.”

Mike has already swung halfway onto his bike. He glances back over his shoulder, and waves at the four of them standing in the dappled shade of the Kissing Bridge.

            “See you at the Quarry!” he calls, standing up and pumping the pedals, and he’s gone even as Richie turns, feeling a wide grin unfurl across his own face at the disgruntled look on Eddie’s.

            “Guess you’re stuck with me, Eds,” Richie says, reveling in the long-suffering way Eddie sighs.

            “Get on the bike then, Trashmouth. And don’t _call_ me that.”

Richie blinks at the lack of opposition, his smile reaching epic cheek-stretching proportions.

            “Yowzers! Eddie Spaghetti, at long last, grows a pair – not only hitching but actually _choosing_ a ride with Derry’s hottest piece of danger!”

            Eddie shares a sidelong glance with Bev, amusement on her side and irritation on his.

            “Shut up, idiot, I’m going swimming in the _Quarry_. I figure if you don’t kill me on the ride there, my mom’ll do it later when she finds out.” He puts on a wavering falsetto and hooks his fingers into claws, pulling at the skin under his eyes. “Oh, Eddie, you did _what?_ Swam in _that_ disease-ridden water?!”

            Ben giggles a bit giddily, and Bev shares a glance with Richie this time. She grins, and Richie swings up onto the seat, barely waiting until Eddie has clambered up behind him to rest one foot impatiently on the upraised pedal.

            “The Quarry awaits!” he trumpets, and pushes off. Unprepared for their combined weight as they lurch forward, Richie spares a thought for all the times Bill has ridden him double on Up-Mile Hill without losing his breath.

            The bike tilts at a crazy angle, wobbling, and Richie bears down hard with Bev and Ben laughing and hollering behind them, pulling them forward even as Eddie shrieks in his ear.

            “Oh God – oh _fuck –_ Jesus, Richie, you’re gonna crash us – oh, _shit_ on a _stick,_ _why didn’t I ride with Bill –“_

            Richie huffs out a little laugh. Eddie’s voice is high and querulous, his hands gripping into the meat of Richie’s upper arms so tight they hurt. As they gain momentum the bike gives one final wobble, and Eddie seems to lose all his words; he sucks in a wavering breath and his arms snake around Richie with panicky tightness, crushing his ribs with fear-born strength, his chest and stomach heaving with fast breaths all the way up Richie’s back and his warm face nestled right between Richie’s shoulder blades.

            _Shit._

The cheek-bunching smile is back on his face as they start to hurtle down Kansas Street, picking up a speed that makes Eddie squeeze even tighter. Richie feels something building sweet and wild in his chest, opposite the place where Eddie’s breath puffs hotly through his T-shirt. He opens his mouth and whoops, long and loud, and some lady looks up from her flowerbed, hazy with the pressing heat of the afternoon.

            _“Woooooooo-hoooooooooo!”_

Eddie mumbles something into Richie’s backbone, and Richie has to shout over the wind that pushes his hair back and whistles cheerily in his ear.

            “ _What was that, Eds?”_

 _“I said don’t drop me, you asshole!”_ Eddie raises his head to yell, then buries his face again, his nose pressing hard into Richie’s shoulder. His mouth is a damp flower, warm breaths blooming quick and erratic on Richie’s skin.

            Richie has a brief flash of association – a fairy tale, maybe, or some corny movie he saw on TV once; a white horse, a prince, and a princess galloping off into a sunset – and he feels something in him sate and purr at the comparison. He blinks, confused, and that split second of distraction is all his bike needs to go bumping up against the curb, sending them into a wild zigzag that makes Eddie give a breathless little scream. Richie snaps himself back onto a straight course, shoving the confusion into whatever distant corner of his brain it came from.

            “Sorry, Eds, just a little, uh, controlled turbulence to keep you on your toes,” he shouts, but his voice is higher than usual, and that might have something to do with Eddie’s fingers scrabbling up to curl around his collarbone.

            When they reach the quarry, joyful shouts and splashes echoing up from the flat water, Richie really fucking wishes Eddie would stay on the back of his bike longer than he does. But he tumbles off into the scrubby grass as soon as they stop, knees practically knocking, and takes several rasping pulls from his inhaler. Richie’s heart is pounding as he ankles up his kickstand, and it’s _really_ fucking weird that he can still kind of feel Eddie’s warm front pressed up against his back.

            “You fucking suck at riding double, Tozier, I’m suing you for malpractice,” Eddie says, but the way he says it is so strange, so careful, that Richie blinks himself out of it and swings down off the bike. It takes him a few seconds longer than usual to form a response.

            “I thought malpractice was for doctors, dumbass,” Richie says, and sees something relax in Eddie’s face, “and my bicycling skills are fine. Maybe you would’ve appreciated them more if you’d spent less time screaming at the back of my head and more time soaking up the scenic beauty of Derry, Maine.”

            “Well, maybe if you learned some basic motor skills, like, uh, _balancing,_ I would’ve had more time to look at the scenery without worrying about you smashing me on the sidewalk.”

            “You were the only one worried, Eddie-my-dear,” Richie says, pinching his cheek, “and hey, I’m always down for a little smashing on the sidewa –“

Eddie fumes, on the surface, but it’s clear he’s struggling not to laugh even as he slaps Richie’s hand away from his face.

“God, Richie, fucking _gross –_ and how many _times_ do I have to tell you I _hate that –“_

 _“Hey!”_ Mike’s shout rings up, bouncing off the limestone cliffs around them, and they both look towards the water. Bill, Stan and Mike are clambering out, stripped to their underwear and looking thoroughly soaked and happy.

            “We were wondering when you guys would get here,” Stan says, and Eddie shakes his head emphatically.

            “Yeah, well, wonder no more, this idiot pretty much crashed us trying to get here faster than the speed of light.”

            Richie grins and bows, propping his bike up next to Silver and bending down to untie his shoes. Bill smiles, swiping drippy hair out of his eyes.

            “Wuh-wuh-well, ruh-ruh-Richie’s driving huh-habits aside, w-we were uh-about to juh-juh-jump uh-again, s-so…” he lets his thought trail off, cocking his thumb towards the rough path that wound through the bushes to the cliffs.

            “So last one there can eat my _ass!”_ Richie finishes for him, stripping off his shirt and throwing it back over his head before tearing up to the path with as much speed as he can force into his legs. Eddie is right behind him, his smile wide, and he yanks Richie by the back of the belt and pulls ahead, his bare pink heel sending a spray of gravel out behind him.

            By the time they get to the jumping place, sweaty and winded, Ben and Bev are there at the bottom of the cliffs, and the five of them catch their breath in the heat while their last two clamber and wind to the top.

            “Ben-verly!” Richie calls as they crest the hill, crunching rocks. “Finally here! Ready to join the ten-minutes-past-fashionably-late club?”

            “Only if it comes with a lifetime free pass from your sparkling wit, Richie,” Bev replies. Mike lets out a quiet _oooh,_ Stan a surprised laugh. “What are you all standing around for? Let’s swim!”

            “You gonna jump?” Eddie asks Ben while meticulously folding his shirt, and Ben nods, gulping, tomato-colored with a combination of heat, blush, and sunburn.

            “Let’s guh-guh- _go,”_ Bill says, and then Bev is pulling off her blouse, and the clifftop gets very quiet all of a sudden.

            Richie looks around, about to open his mouth and crack some joke, but the words die on his lips when he realizes it wouldn’t matter what he said. Everyone is staring at Bev as she kicks her jeans down and away, every embarrassed eye but Richie’s focused on the curve of her back, the straight lines of her legs, and the paleness of her stomach. Bill’s mouth is very slightly ajar, and Ben’s redness has reached cataclysmic levels; he looks ready to explode.

            He looks for a second, trying to see whatever mystery they see. Bev is pretty, sure, no doubt about it – her hair falls in a bright tumble over one shoulder, shining in the sunlight like beaten copper, and her skin goes from dense freckle-tan on her arms and face and legs to creamy-white, a warm color against her faded, grayish underwear – but Richie doesn’t see anything that makes him _keep_ looking; he misses whatever weird-ass glue is sticking the others’ vision to her like flies on honey. His eyes skip past her to Eddie, standing in just his bleached-white boxer shorts, and those high spots of color are back on his face, one hand pressed halfway over his rosy-pink mouth, and oh boy does _Eddie_ look pretty – his collarbones sharp and hungry, his thin chest pitted with too-visible ribs, a flush of sunburn starting on his nose and winging out to each cheek, hair blowing up into little wisps that catch the sun in gold –

            Richie jerks when that strange, breathless moment falls apart. Bev straightens to peg Bill with her wadded-up jeans, yells, and launches herself over the cliff in crazy joy. Ben, looking stricken, runs to the edge and looks after her, then goes pinwheeling over when Mike grabs at his arm on the way down. Stan unfreezes and runs after Bill, who dives as gracefully as a falcon dropping out of the air, and Richie is nauseous because the world is tilting on its axis, sloshing his brain and his guts in opposite directions.

            _Fucking faggot, crazy homos, gay fairy fucks,_ he hears Henry Bowers sneer.

He thinks of being taunted and shoved on the playground, gravel stinging deep in both knees, and Stan, voice low and serious, telling him that boys can’t hold hands after they turn seven.

            _Queer is when a man wants a man like he’s supposed to want a woman,_ his mother had sniffed, _and it’s a sin, Rich. God wants to love them, but they’re dirty. Sick._

Sick. Dirty. Queer.

_Little fagboy, fucking homo faggot fucks._

The graffiti on the Kissing Bridge has been there for as long as he could remember, probably much longer than that, and before he knew what the words meant he used to snicker and look, wishing he had a marker or can of spray paint so he could join the violent artists of that shrieking expletive museum: _STUPID FAGS! SUCK MY DICK YOU PERVERT FAGGOT! DERRY FAGGOTS MUST DIE!_

He thinks of Eddie’s mouth pressed against his back, and shudders.

Sick. Dirty. _Wrong._

            He thinks of Eddie’s scowl, his smile, his arms wrapped around him, and then he thinks he might cry.

            “Hey, Richie, you catatonic?” He hears, and then Eddie is there, tapping on the front of his forehead: one, two, three quick taps.

            _Watch out, Eds, I’m sick and you could catch it,_ Richie thinks wildly, and he swallows around something painful, his throat full of teeth, jerking back from Eddie’s hand warm on his arm.

            Eddie is blinking, one, two, three quick blinks, and Richie feels like he might puke. He’s close enough to see his ridiculous eyelashes, maybe close enough to count them, and he opens his mouth without being sure of what will come out – but, for the first time, Eddie beats him to it.

            “C’mon, you’re not gonna pussy out on the cliff, are you?” He asks, and then he takes a closer look, a wrinkle falling between his eyebrows. His serious eyes flick down to Richie’s cheeks, his mouth. “Hey, do you feel sick? You look really pale.”

            An awful laugh barks out of him, a single choked _ha!_ and Richie can’t help the queasy humor any more than he can help his hands, which are numb as if they’ve been held in ice. Eddie looks even more confused, and Richie swallows again, swallows helplessly, futilely, around the biggest lie he’s ever tried to spew. He forces the words out like he’s coughing up rocks, pushing them out even as he chokes on them.

            “No problem, Eds, I’m

_(gaypussyhomofreakfaggotdirtywrongsickqueer)_

            fine. Totally chuckalicious, in fact.”

Eddie doesn’t look convinced, and Richie lets the words keep coming, feeling relief weaken his knees when they stop sticking in his mouth.

            “You better believe I’m still gonna jump that cliff – I just, uh, needed a few sweet minutes to think about tonight – you know, what I’m going to do with your mom –“

            And Eddie shrieks, as Richie knew he would, and stumbles away, as Richie knew he would. He runs over the edge of the cliff, and Richie tries not to laugh when he sees Eddie flip him a pretty good double bird just before he drops out of sight. The laughter escapes him anyway, turning into a noise that, from anyone else’s throat, Richie would have probably called a big baby sob.

            There’s a distant splash, voices and laughter, and the heat of the day and the sick heat inside him are pressing, pressing from opposite directions, doing their best to crush him down into something less than dirt.

            Richie takes a long, shuddering breath, and he runs and jumps.

The quarry is cold, a blessing, the milky water an almost tropical blue. Richie surfaces with his face wet, trying to laugh through the alkaline taste blasted through his mouth.

            They stay and swim and splash, climb out to jump and fly and dry themselves in the sun. The whole time, Richie sneaks looks at Eddie, the curve of his wet neck, the bow of his mouth, and feels his guts heaving dizzy, whipping back and forth between something bilious and something sweet.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for:
> 
> \- violence
> 
> -blood & gore
> 
> \- vomit

 

The day they kill It, stumbling up from the sewers with eyes wide and mouths stretched by unborn screams, Richie realizes as well as an eleven-year-old can that he’s in love.

There are too many feelings that day, swimming around in his head and welling up in floods behind his nose and mouth and eyes. There’s the raw terror of it all, the discrepancy of going from a hot summer rainstorm to slick, dripping darkness that stinks of sulfur and sewage and something gone wrong, something _animal –_ something hulking and sweaty that sure as fucking hell isn’t Henry Bowers’ pits. But there’s excitement, too, the same _rightness_ they felt after the rockfight; they have the seven of them, they have their silver slug, they have Bev’s steady hands, one closed around the slingshot and one maintaining a death grip on Mike’s wrist.

They file along in the dark, lunatics on parade, using each other’s hands as sweaty anchors in the bottom of a strange, claustrophobic sea. Richie can smell shit and, worse, can feel it sloshing around in his shoes, but his heart is unaffected, hammering with a giddy cocktail of glee and fear. They are absolutely focused, outrunning Henry and Belch and Victor, hearing their yells echoing up the tunnels and bouncing around the pipes, the only sounds in their group heavy breaths and Eddie murmuring the occasional _left_ or _no, other way._

            The silence stretches on too long after the shouts of the big boys peter out, and Richie is left to his own scrambled thoughts, buzzing like malevolent hummingbirds around his head. He feels uneasy, fluttery, a nervous minnow replacing the determination that had been warming his chest. That shitty little fish is evicting his calm, pushing it from its comfortable resting place right behind his breastbone, _get lost, keed, yous knows who’zza big boss ‘round here now,_ and Richie curses it in his head, feeling colder, suddenly, as if they were wandering through one of those half-frozen pipes that his dad always had to go knock ice off in the winter –

            Ahead, Bill must have stopped, because their little procession had come to a dead halt, waiting in the dark – _listening._

Then Richie hears it, and suddenly, with a jolt of cold dread he knows what It is – that creeping, _smutching_ squelch, that crawl of horror like seaweed and slimy sinew and things best left dead.

            _“It’s the Eye, oh, fuck, the Crawling EYE!”_ Richie screams, and his voice, high and panicky and ripping through the tunnel like a sonic blast, is almost as bad as what looms out of the darkness.

            It is ten feet tall, quivering, gelatinous, spherical and obscenely pale, its pupil vibrating back and forth between them, its tentacles like hoary, slime-covered ropes twisting and twining about the tunnel to pull it along. As Richie watches, feeling his feet freeze in place and his own eyes start to bulge out of his skull, they reach and probe and find his friends, pulling them, almost lovingly, in to It. Bill shrieks, Beverly screams in pain, and Richie hears some scuffling, some other voices that sound misty, dim, and far away. His mind teeters on the brink of some vast unknown.

            _The fuck are we doing,_ Richie thinks, calm with despair, his mouth stretching wide in soundless horror as tentacles slide over his frozen skin. _We could never win, this motherfucker_ eats _kids, and what’ve we got but a forked stick and seven walking cuts of fresh meat –_

And then Eddie breaks the spell.

_“NO!”_

            It isn’t a rasp, or a choked, desperate gamble for breath, but a _roar,_ like a lion or Viking warrior, and Richie’s brain is struggling to attach that sound to Eddie even as he sees a small shape spring forwards, _towards the Eye,_ and another unearthly scream is tearing up the pipe and into the darkness beyond.

            _“BATTERY ACID, FUCKNUTS!”_ Eddie explodes, and, absurdly, Richie can hear the familiar breathless _hsss_ of his aspirator being triggered and suddenly something is in his head, echoing through without any connection to his ears, a hurt, wailing cry, a _mewl,_ repulsively kittenish, and he pictures a cloud of poisonous yellow-green landing on the Eye, eating away its glassy iris in great sizzling chunks.

            _“FUCK OFF, CRAM IT, GO AWAY, GET LOST! GET THE FUCK OUT!”_ Eddie’s screams have the rhythm of a chant, a litany, and Its spell starts to break, tentacles slowly retracting like slugs from salt. _“IT’S JUST AN EYE! KILL IT! KICK THE SHIT OUT OF IT! FIGHT IT, BILL, IT’S JUST A FUCKING EYE!”_ Somehow, Eddie is laughing. “ _I’M DOING THE MASHED POTATOES ALL OVER IT AND I HAVE A BROKEN ARM!”_

Richie coughs out a little laugh at that, a desperate wheeze, and the tentacles drop off him as if they’ve been scorched.

 _“JUST AN EYE, JUST A FUCKING EYE,”_ Eddie is screaming, and now his voice is rising in hysteria and triumph, becoming thin and shrieky, _“RICHIE! RICHIE! GET IT! IT’S JUST AN EYE!”_

Richie hears wet punches, like someone is wading into a swimming pool of Jell-o. He feels his gorge rise, an awful _urk_ lurching in his throat, but at the same time his feet unfreeze and he stumbles forward.

_(do it you pussy it’s just an Eye just an Eye justafuckingEye)_

Richie swings his fist blindly, closing his eyes against the writhing dark, and when he feels it sink up to the elbow into something warm and jiggly he loses his lunch. Twice.

            But after that the Eye is gone, howling and receding down the pipe back into darkness. Richie stands between Ben and Bill and Eddie, hearing Bev’s raspy crying, and jumps when he feels something on his back, but then Bill lights a match and he knows it’s just Eddie’s hand. Eddie is looking up at him, grime and concern smeared all over his dumb pretty face. Richie wipes his mouth shakily, the back of his hand coming away sour.

            They breathe in the dark, and Bill sweeps Eddie into a hug when the match burns out. Richie waits for them to be done and then does the same thing, his arms crushing them together, feeling the rough plaster of Eddie’s cast scrape against the back of his shirt. Eddie’s face rests for a brief moment in the crook of Richie’s neck and shoulder, and he squeezes once, twice, three times, maybe a bit too tightly.

            It’s blurry after that. Richie remembers them joining hands again, he remembers the tunnel widening into a chamber, he remembers It as Mike’s bird, dive-bombing Eddie, screams and the splatter of his blood on the filthy flagged floor. He remembers the chamber widening into a space with a ceiling that soared and faded into mist, higher than twenty cathedrals – some twisted parody of a holy place, a slavering worship chamber for the mad. There was a wall, he knows, a wall so big they couldn’t comprehend it, and a comically tiny door with some kind of black mark on it – a fairy-tale door, for children.

            And, as much as he wishes he didn’t, Richie remembers that room through the door, Its room, an upscaled Shelob’s Lair mixed with a host of cheap Halloween props, because those bodies couldn’t be real – they _couldn’t_ – they were kids missing limbs and heads and eyes, hanging from the ceiling, suspended by silk that shook and guttered like a candleflame in a light wind. And he remembers It, racing down the web trailing blood or ichor or liquid dark matter from holes in its carapace, a shrilling, scuttling horror that hurt Richie to look at too long, and he remembers Bill going towards It, brave Bill, and the Ritual of Chüd began and ended with the seven of them holding hands, panting into that foul ancient tingling air, Bill’s empty eyes locked with Its, their battle raging all around but somehow far above in an endless soundless scream.

            Richie remembers it all with the clarity usually reserved for nightmares – the odd staggered flashes of selective awareness, coupled with the blurring of the whole, the slow fade, the disappearance of the bad dream once you’ve woken up with the covers puddled around your waist and every hair standing up on your head. The Ritual itself is blurry to him, but parts of the aftermath form a bright patchwork of lucidity, impressions in the dark. Then Richie blanks out for a long time, _thanks, ladies and gents, it’s been a great show but I really should –_ conscious only of Mike’s sweaty hand in his, tight, tightly.

            When they get back up to the light, the storm has passed. The Barrens are still and verdant, dripping with aftermath, and as they crawl from the drain one by one but together, shell-shocked, the sun breaks out, turning every branch and leaf tip into a diamond.

            Richie is shaking as they stand in the rain-swollen Kenduskeag, and remembers only a rock brought down, the tinkle of glass, a small, sharp pain singing through both his palms. A perfect circle, Eddie’s blood on one side and Mike’s on the other. The power, the _rightness,_ moves through them one last time, heavy, scraping as monumentally as a boulder rampaging down a glacier, and then it’s gone, sweeping off on wings like summer thunder.

            They drop each other’s hands at the same time, everybody operating under some dazed, unspoken agreement, and nothing needs to be said. Richie opens his mouth, lets out a little croak, and says it anyway.

            “I’m gonna go get some ice cream.”

They all just look for a second; it is completely unreal, as if the water had caught fire or the sky turned green. Then Ben is nodding with such solemnity that Richie feels something low in his stomach, a crazy, rising thing, and he doesn’t even realize it’s laughter until it bursts through him like a river through a dam, and they are all laughing, hurt, covered in blood and shit, Beverly’s ear scabbing over, Eddie’s arm hanging at a strange angle in its saturated cast. They stand and laugh because they’re children in the summertime, and they let the Kenduskeag wash their feet clean.

            They all go to Bill’s house, sit in the backyard on blankets in the sweet-smelling grass and take turns using the shower. Eddie spends a full hour in the house and Richie gets tired of waiting, so he finds a hose in Bill’s shed and runs with it, feeling the icy water scrape off the sewer’s muck. His hand stings, and he runs after Bev to distract himself, laughing until his stomach hurts when he catches her in the face and she wrestles him down to stick the hose down the back of his pants.

            Eddie, at long last, comes out the back door dressed in Bill’s clean clothes: jeans rolled up six times and a shirt that falls to his thighs like a toga. Bev grins and stands up, giving Richie an extra poke in the ribs, and he wheezes, rolling over onto his back, utterly content.

            Richie closes his eyes, and when he opens them again Eddie is there.

It’s as simple as that and somehow much more complicated. Maybe it’s the way Eddie is standing over him, hands on his hips, eyes on the mud and grass Richie can feel smeared across one cheek. Maybe it’s the old-ladyish set of his mouth, the prim disapproval in the way he bites at one corner of his lip, the wrinkle on his forehead. Maybe it’s the shirt, about four sizes too big, his elbows fine-drawn and bony and absolutely fucking tiny in Bill’s clothes. Maybe it’s how his skin is scrubbed so clean he glows pink, and Richie knows he spent an hour in the shower trying so hard to sanitize himself, to get rid of all those germs, and he feels the urge to shove Eddie into the mud and kiss him at the same time, exasperation and fondness and a huge, sweet thing all blooming and rising at once in a confusion of thorns and flowers.

            _I love you,_ Richie thinks, simple as that.

“Hey, Eds,” he chokes out instead, because _holy shit_.

            “You’re covered in sewage,” Eddie says back, his voice completely neutral. For some reason this kills Richie, and he laughs until his stomach hurts and Stan speaks up seriously from the blanket, his feet on Bill’s lap.

            “I wonder why, Eddie?”

Eddie shrugs and half-turns towards the pile of them, one hand on his hip. His feet are pink and bare.

            “I don’t know. It’s summer, Richie Tozier is on the loose, and the Losers are all accounted for, so I’m guessing it has something to do with a killer monster living in the sewers or –“

            “ – your mom. It was your mom,” Mike supplies, and Richie is laughing again even as he opens his mouth.

            “Zing!” He cries, “Michael Hanlon gets off a _good one –“_

“Not you too, Mike!” Eddie cries, clutching at his chest, and Richie can feel himself collapsing with a joy too big to hold.

            “Hey Eds,” pops out, Eddie turns from where he was walking away, and Richie pauses, for once no words coming to help him counter whatever the fuck Eddie’s face is making him feel.

            “Hey Richie?” Eddie prompts after the eye contact has gone on several seconds too long, and Richie stands, shaking hosewater from his hair into his eyes, blurting out the first thing that comes to mind.

            “You didn’t tell me to stop calling you Eds.”

And Eddie visibly startles, flushing with anger or maybe something else, something sweeter that Richie doesn’t dare put into words. Then they run as Richie reaches out with a smear of mud on his hand, Eddie shrieks, dodging, _no, no don’t you fucking dare,_ and the other five cheer them on until they collapse on the blanket, Bill around Stan over Mike on top of Ben next to Bev under Richie hugging Eddie, a puppyish tangle of limbs and careless seven-way love, a fierce child’s joy – the sun is shining and they are glad to be alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi !! please comment, i would love to hear what you have to say !!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> :')))))

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for:
> 
> \- mentions of suicide
> 
> \- minor blood & gore
> 
> \- even more internalized homophobia
> 
> \- death

The day he finally remembers everything, Richie Tozier watches Eddie Kaspbrak die.

When he arrives in Derry, it’s like trying to see things through a wall in a maze of mirrors – Richie is unsure what he’s remembering and what he’s experiencing, fragments of his forgotten childhood reflecting back to leer at him from a thousand crazy funhouse angles. He has double vision, seeing the bricks and fabric awnings of old downtown rise up out of the sleek, post-modern steel and concrete, like the old corpses of burned trees in the trash-growth forest that springs back after a fire. He feels further and further away from himself, progressively less real the longer he stands in the fogged-out chilly streets of Derry; he is no longer Rich Tozier, lover, fighter, comedian and disc jockey of Los Angeles, California, with his travel agent, contact lenses and radio show, Mondays through Fridays six to ten every weekday morning. He is in the process of re-becoming Richie Trashmouth of Derry, Maine, a nobody kid with perpetually scraped knees and bad hair, who, despite twelve years of intimate acquaintanceship with public school toilets, never quite learned how to shut his mouth.

            He reaches for his glasses in a tic of muscle memory, pushing up only air.

The restaurant is dimly lit and atmospheric, and he shoves down his unease as the lady shows him to a beaded curtain. A burst of laughter comes from the other side. He swallows, mutters his thanks to the hostess, and steps through.

            At first, they are a room full of strangers, strange eyes flicking up to scald him as the conversation screeches to a halt, but in the silence something enormous falls into place, a thousand memories or more socking neatly back into his brain.

            “Trashmouth!” Ben roars, lunging up to meet him. Richie blinks, the double vision assaulting him again – Ben is fat no longer, tall and even wiry, but the round, joyous peaches of his cheeks are one and the same when he smiles.

            They are all upon him, talking through mouths full of laughter, Bill gentle and balding, Bev tough and knock-em-dead beautiful, Mike bespectacled, kind, and worn-around-the-edges, and –

            “Eds!” Richie says, but it’s more a cough than an exclamation, strangled, because Eddie Kaspbrak is smiling at him, and fuck, Richie had forgotten the whole messy slew of shit _that_ used to send through his chest.

            “Guess I still have to say it,” Eddie sighs, “don’t fucking call me Eds.”

His hair is lighter than Richie tentatively remembers, blonde approaching gray, and the painfully neat cut of childhood has given way to waves that flop down onto his forehead. He looks a bit like a careworn librarian: button-up shirt, threadbare, suit-jacket elbows patched by a loving hand. He has the tiredness under his eyes that Richie has come to associate with anyone over the age of nineteen, but his eyelashes are still longer than a little girl’s.

            “Comin’ in for a hug or waaat, shweethaaat?” Richie asks as Mafia Hugh, popular on the radio and apparently popular with Eddie, because his smile widens and smooths, and he comes forward to wrap his arms around Richie’s waist. After twenty-seven years, his nose still barely reaches Richie’s shoulder.

 _\- but somebody’s got to toughen you up, Eds,_ Richie hears in some deep recess of his head, his own forgotten pre-pubescent voice ridiculous to his ears. His vision splits, then is practically canceled out by the jumbled impressions accompanying the memory – darkness, dripping water, a tunnel, maybe, who the fuck knew – adrenaline, a terror that grew and faded all at once, and under it all, some species of joy – Richie blinks, hard, and grips Eddie’s shoulder, hard –

“ – to say, your face loses some definition without the coke bottles, Richie,” Mike is saying, and Eddie breaks the hug, stepping back with a puzzled, fading smile.

Richie takes a second to answer as he forces himself back into the present. His arms fall limply to his sides, and he drags a hand down his face to give it something to do.

“That’s the point, Mikey baby, see once I hit college I finally realized those bad boys made me the human equivalent to a punching bag –“

“Only took you eighteen years, then? I’m impressed,” Bev interrupts, laughing, and she punches him lightly on the shoulder herself – his vision splits again as he feels the impact of her knuckles, and as the room slips out of focus he sees the face of a much younger Bev with a bruise on her jawline, a cigarette tucked into the corner of her grin. He grabs at his hair, squeezing his eyes tight tight tight, and he feels more like his eleven-year-old self than ever, hiding his face from the residual nightmare things that would squirm and crawl just beyond the safe glow of his Mickey Mouse night-light. He grits his teeth.

“It’s huh-huh-happening to you, too? Th-the duh-duh-déjà vu?” Bill asks, and Richie’s head shoots up. They all look exhausted, he is only noticing now, mouths drawn a little too tight, eyes puffy as if with lack of sleep.

“I don’t know _what_ the fuck is happening, Bill,” Richie says. Even though it sounded like a joke in his head, it comes out genuine, almost pleading, and he remembers how it feels to be scared of his own voice.

Eddie’s hand moves suddenly, convulsing at his side, and Richie gives him a puzzled glance before something bigger strikes him, something that stops him dead.

“We’re all getting it, Richie, it’s –“ Ben is saying, but Richie interrupts him mercilessly, feeling the words tumble out of a mouth that is cold and numb with some awful apprehension.

“Wait – no, hold _on,_ Ben – there’s supposed to be seven of us,” he says, struggling to remember the name, the fucking _name,_ but for a hideously frustrating moment all he can get is the flash of unreachable memories, a songbird flying between trees too fast to identify. It comes to him like a slap to the face, and he snaps his fingers in triumph. “Stanley! Stan Uris! Why’s Stan the Man so late?” Richie lets out a little half-laugh before he looks around at their faces, and then he feels the relief sink as quickly as a pin-poked balloon. No one speaks for a moment.

“Stan is dead, Richie,” Mike says, his voice empty, and Richie feels a dull blow to his stomach – not surprise, more a sick sort of certainty falling like a boulder from his chest to his guts.

“Shit – how-?” He asks, and watches Mike’s face crumple a little. Bill speaks up when it becomes clear no one else is going to, barely understandable through the wrath of his stutter.

“W-wuh-when muh-muh-Mike c-c-called huh-him, he cuh-couldn’t fuh-fuh-face it. Couldn’t come buh-buh-back. H-he kuh-kuh-killed h-huh-him-suh-s-suh-suh –“ Bill swallows, hard, and swipes at his eyes with the back of one shaking hand. “His ruh-ruh-r-wrists. In h-his buh-buh-bathtub.”

“Oh God,” Richie whispers. The back of his throat feels about as wide as the eye of a needle. “Oh fuck.”

“Yeah,” Bev says very softly, and there is silence until it is broken by a familiar sound that startles them nonetheless: the wheezing blast of Eddie’s aspirator.

Richie’s mouth opens before he can stop it, and it seems he can hear his present voice in tandem with his memory-voice, a duet in octaves that makes the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

“Eddie Kaspbrak blasts off, folks – that’s three-two-one takeoff, his engines are a little rusty but he is coughing up success –“ He claps his hand over his own mouth. Eddie looks like he’s seen a ghost, his eyes wide and pale around the edges. “I – I’m sorry, Eddie, that was cruel. I don’t know where that came from.”

“Came from your old self,” Ben says a little hoarsely. A shiver seems to ruffle through them, and Richie realizes they have unconsciously formed a perfect circle.

Looking around at their faces, Richie feels a flash of pain in his palm, the same place he’s been feeling it for nearly three days, but this time the memory flashes back in a burst of summer sunlight – river water moving over their feet and over stones, the smell of rain, red blood next to green leaves, and the glitter of glass –

“Everything okay in here?” The spell breaks, their hostess poking her head in through the bead curtain, her voice carefully neutral. _Probably thinks we’re a bunch of wackjobs,_ Richie thinks deliriously, trying to blink the double vision away as Mike nods and smiles.

They sit around the table, and, impossibly, the atmosphere is light again. _More like a college reunion than a blood pact made by children to kill a murderous, incorporeal monster,_ Richie thinks, _Jesus Christ,_ but then he is distracted by the food coming in because suddenly he is ravenous.

They stay for hours, eating, talking, laughing, and slowly the memories filter back through. Frustratingly, Richie remembers mostly little details, like the way he and Bev used to share cigarettes or the spare bandana Mike always tucked into his back pocket. Bill’s _Hi-yo, Silver!_ shouts back into Richie’s head over lo mein, Ben’s notepads full of graph paper and pockets full of candy by the time they cut into the peking duck. They tell stories of the Loser’s Club, and slowly the patchwork of memories becomes more solid, but still they are missing integral blocks of their past – Richie thinks they fought It, but he can’t quite put his finger on the when-where-how of it, or the way It looked or the way they felt – it’s only a black movie screen, and Richie is sure he won’t be happy he remembers when the whole reel is finally played back.

It’s the fortune cookies that drive them out – It springs upon them, and each separate horror is like turning over a log in the woods, expecting clean soil but finding the maggot-ridden carcass of an animal. Richie’s mind is screaming for sleep, but his heart is running like a rabbit from a wildfire. His hands shake as he bids Ben, Bill, Mike and Bev goodnight, holding the restaurant door.

“Are you going back to the Town House?” He hears from his left, and he startles at Eddie, who is looking tiredly up at him, backlit by the yellow light of the room they just left.

“Sure am,” Richie agrees, and a joke about taking Eddie back to his room slips into his mouth and withers on his next exhale. There’s something painful in his chest at the way Eddie glances both ways before they cross the street, and something warmer is rising that he thinks is a memory, but he isn’t quite sure.

“I’ll walk with you,” Eddie says, “we shouldn’t be out here alone.”

They shuffle towards the hotel like drunks after a long night, eyes on shoes. The silence is halfway to one Richie remembers, comfortable underneath, but the new part is charged with tension and overlaid with fear.

            “I can’t believe I forgot my whole fucking childhood,” Richie says after a minute, and Eddie looks over, nodding vehemently. “All those memories just not there anymore. What the fuck.”

            “The worst part is that I think we never would’ve known if Mike hadn’t called,” Eddie replies, troubled. The harsh orange of the streetlight they pass under sends shadows across his face, deepening the grooves carved in next to his mouth, the soft, bruised places under his eyes. Then he laughs. “I can’t believe I forgot you and your stupid jokes.”

            “Indeed,” Richie says, the voice of an affronted English gentleman huffing out, “I assumed my propensity for rather crass humor would have guaranteed me an absolute shrine in your memory.”

            Eddie is still laughing, and Richie basks in the amazement written all across his face, at once familiar and unknown.

“At least your voices have gotten better,” he says, and his teasing has sweetened compared to the memories it brings back, the cold exasperation gone and all the fondness shining through.

“When were they ever bad?” Richie screeches, holding the hotel door for Eddie, and the receptionist looks up in mild annoyance. Richie gives her a quick salute as he and Eddie slip up into the stairwell.

“We called you Trashmouth for a reason, Richie,” Eddie says, and he’s actually _giggling_ at Richie’s overly flabbergasted expression. “Multiple reasons, actually.”

“I don’t believe it,” Richie groans in mock despair. “My whole adolescence a delusion – I always tell interviewers my talent bloomed young, and you’re telling me I sucked?” Between the steep flight of stairs they’re climbing and the breathy quality of Eddie’s voice, his heart has moved up into his throat.

“Yeah, your voices kind of sucked shit,” Eddie agrees, and laughs when Richie makes a sound like a wounded animal, clutching at his heart. “I loved you anyway,” Eddie adds casually, then his hand slips off the banister and his foot slips off the step, and Richie would have crashed into him if he hadn’t frozen at the words. He is trapped in amber, his eyes moving with unbelievable slowness from his own feet to the back of Eddie’s head.

“I –“ Eddie starts to say, and the glazed unfocus in his eyes as he turns is enough to tell Richie about the double vision he’s experiencing, the memories thundering back to wherever they belong.

Richie comes up a step, still with that floating feeling – his insides have come unmoored, the air is too thick, and he is swimming through honey until they are on the same step. He steals a shallow inhale, feeling Eddie’s breath on his chin.

“Funny, you always said how much you hated me, Eds.”

Eddie’s eyes focus again, and they shine with fear, skipping from Richie’s eyes to his nose to his cheek until they finally come to rest on his mouth.

            “Don’t call me Eds,” he breathes against Richie’s lips, and then they are crashing together, waves on sand, a silent symphony of the unspoken in the silver moonlight that pours through the window.

            Richie scoops Eddie firmly between himself and the wall, feeling panicked hands tighten and relax in the weave of his sweater before they caress up his back. He shivers. Eddie kisses timidly at first, as if afraid to move his mouth, but he gets looser the longer Richie attends to his lower lip. There is something wild but unspeakably tender sweeping through him, something inhibited by memories, and he welcomes its confusion as Eddie melts against him. The little sound Eddie releases into his mouth undoes whatever normally holds Richie together, and he waits for the double vision, for the memories to crowd up behind him, because now it all makes perfect sense – but nothing comes. Despite how familiar it feels, this seems to be entirely new.

            Richie opens his eyes enough to push the tumble of Eddie’s hair back off his forehead, then tangles his fingers in it, breaking the kiss to bury his nose in the crook of Eddie’s neck. He breathes deeply for a moment, taking in the smells of warm skin and aftershave, then kisses on the exhale, his mouth soft and damp and open.

            “Jesus,” Eddie gasps, tilting his head back. Richie looks up for a second, and _fuck,_ he can’t deny the jolt he feels in his stomach at the color in Eddie’s cheeks, the way his pulse is ticking visibly in the column of his throat.

            “Please, call me Richie,” he mumbles, and he feels the helpless reverberation of Eddie’s laugh tremble through him like an earthquake.

            Then Eddie drags him back up by the collar, kissing his mouth, his cheek, his eyelid, and when he nibbles at the edge of his ear Richie can _feel_ his fucking knees go weak.

            “What floor –“ he is interrupted by Eddie’s mouth on his, needy, and his brain is rendered entirely useless, fogged over like the windows of a car at a drive-in. He tries again, his words coming out in disjointed bursts as he kisses urgently at Eddie’s jaw. “Your room. What floor are you – I want –“

            “Fourth,” Eddie breathes. His voice is whispery, thin as paper. Suddenly, he stiffens against Richie, the air souring between them. “Oh god, oh – oh, _fuck,_ Richie, I can’t do this, oh my god _Myra – “_

Eddie pushes him away and Richie steps back with his hands up, something cold and angry coiling in the pit of his stomach. He sees the glint of gold on Eddie’s shaking hand as he tries to push some order back into his disheveled hair; he remembers the wedding ring Eddie had flashed at the dinner table to general surprise, a vague, bashful smile on his face. He remembers and he knows Eddie probably loves his wife, but he still can’t help the vengeful little voice that snarls through his head – Myra? _Did Myra carry a fucking spare inhaler for you every day for three years in case you stopped breathing? Did Myra spend all of middle school following you on the sly to make sure you didn’t get your scrawny ass kicked? Did_ Myra _wait twenty-seven years for that kiss?_

            “Sorry,” Richie mutters, and Eddie glances up, meeting him halfway. His eyes glitter with terror, and he drops his gaze, taking a long, shivering breath.

“I’m – I’m not _gay,_ Richie.” Eddie whispers it like the words burn his throat, and the tears dripping down his nose make the nasty thoughts shrivel and die in Richie’s head, replacing them with pity and a little hiss of shame.

            “Neither am I,” Richie shrugs, and Eddie’s head shoots up, “but there’s always an exception, I guess, and _you,_ Eddie Spaghetti, are nothing if not exceptional.”

            Eddie reacts almost violently, shaking his head hard and crossing his arms protectively over his chest.

“No. Stop it. You don’t get to – to come here and make me want to – a-and then be all sentimental and – and charming. You were so fucking annoying when we were kids, and part of me hated you – or part of me _wanted_ to hate you, I guess, but I never – I –“ He trails off, helpless. Richie feels hope bloom in him like a strange and tentative flower.

            “Eds – do you remember – did we ever –“

Eddie is shaking his head again, but this time it’s not so panicked. He bites at his lower lip, and Richie has a dizzy moment of double vision at the sight – an unnoticed smutch of dirt on Eddie’s thoughtful face, an old wood door, and one word

( _clubhouse)_

– there and gone before he can recognize it.

            “I – I was scared that we would, I think,” Eddie says, and the words are shaky, slow with something that Richie won’t let himself believe is regret. “Remember the leper?”

            “At the Neibolt house. Yeah,” Richie says, remembering only as Eddie mentions it. At the time, he had thought nothing of it other than _fuck that house_ , but now –

            “Remember? It offered to blow me,” Eddie presses, and he sinks down to sit on the step. He is either crying or laughing as Richie moves to sit next to him. “Out of all the shit I was scared of – diseases, my friends dying, wild animals – _that_ was what It came to me as – and I – Jesus, Richie, I didn’t know whether to be more scared of what was eating him alive – eating _It_ alive – or the fact that – that maybe some part of me _wanted –“_

            Eddie is definitely crying now, his breath hitching and tapering off into a familiar painful wheeze. Richie puts a hand on his back, then tentatively slides an arm around his quaking shoulders, relieved when he doesn’t move away.

            “Hey, that’s – it’s okay, Eds, don’t worry about it. I –“ He swallows. Eddie has fumbled the aspirator from his pocket and is taking long, whooping breaths. “You know, until I grew up and got the fuck out of Derry I didn’t realize being a queer wasn’t a crime. They’re like everyone else, especially in California where you meet one every time you turn a damn corner.” Eddie is calming down, and Richie closes his mouth, biting off the words that cringe on his tongue – the confessions of parties he can barely remember, nights that invariably ended with men in his bed; how one night, for a reason he couldn’t remember, he had gone out and come home completely sober with a shy, five-foot seven-inch man named Edward Caspian, waking up to a kiss he could neither ignore nor return.

            He swallows, something clicking in his throat, and Eddie takes a deep breath beside him. Neither of them speak for a minute, until –

            “I’ve spent my whole life being afraid of this, I think,” Eddie says, “and I – oh god, I don’t know if right now is the time to try and figure it out.”

            “No time like the present, Eds, as my Boy Scout leader used to say,” Richie jokes, and sends fervent thanks for the watery smile Eddie finally, finally gives him in return.

            “Except I doubt the Boy Scouts of America ever wanted to get into my pants, Tozier,” Eddie sighs, and Richie barks out a surprised laugh.

            “I don’t know, Eds – I think there was a certain Derry Boy Scout who had his eyes on the sweet little tush in your cargo shorts –“

            Eddie smacks his arm to shut him up, his face flushed but laughing, and things go almost back to normal up until they are both standing in the darkened hallway outside Eddie’s door.

            “Well, goodnight,” he says seriously, looking up at Richie, and his goddamn _eyelashes –_ they’re so long they catch the moonlight and coat themselves in silver.

            “Sweet dreams, Eds,” Richie replies, and the little smile Eddie gives makes him close his eyes against the lightheaded flicker of a dozen memories at once, that shy little quirk of the lips he had tried so hard to see –

            “Hey, you’re alright,” He hears, soft, and he comes back to the shadowy hall leaning into Eddie, his legs rubbery, two hands firm on his upper arms. “Richie?”

            “Golden, shweethaaat,” Richie mumbles, stepping back, watching Eddie’s face relax. He is too tired for the Voice, and he reverts. “Sleep well. I’m gonna hit the hay so hard it won’t remember its own name.”

            Eddie nods, looking like he’s about to say something else, but he finally just opens the door and flicks the light on, his expression somber and his nose still red with crying. His eyes linger on Richie’s until the door shuts between them, and Richie stands there for a good three seconds

_(what were you hoping for, princess, a goodnight kiss)_

before he snaps out of it and goes down the two floors to his own room.

            He wakes no more than three hours later to the telephone, shrilling an alarm that makes him bolt upright before he realizes what’s wrong. He fumbles for his glasses, lurches out of bed, gets his feet tangled in the blanket and curses, feeling anxiety well up in his throat, some premonition of panicked _wrong_ knocking around his brain like a bird trapped in an attic.

            “Hello?” He finally spits into the phone, and Bev is on the end of the line. Her voice makes Richie’s heart plummet into his stomach – it is calm with despair.

            “Richie? Come up to Eddie’s room, as fast as you can. It’s number six-oh-nine, on the fourth –“

“I know where it is. I’m coming,” He blurts, and slams the phone back down onto the cradle to end the sickening _ooommmmmmmm_ of the dial tone. He yanks on a pair of pants, rushes out the door, and careens into something that lets out a muffled yell.

            “Relax, Rich, it’s just me,” Ben whispers, his eyes like saucers, “c’mon, I don’t know what happened but we need to get upstairs –“

            Richie doesn’t have time to nod – he just tears up the stairs with Ben, feeling nausea nudging his throat.

            They get to the fourth floor and Ben knocks politely on Eddie’s door. Richie swallows the urge to shove past him and kick through because _something happened to Eddie_ and they’re just standing here like kids invited to a birthday party, waiting for the mom to let them in for cake and ice cream –

            Bev opens the door, pale and strained, and she motions for them to come in even as she turns back to the center of the room. Bill is standing next to the bed, wrapping something around Eddie’s arm. It’s hanging at a funny angle, unnatural, and Richie winces.

            “Christ, Eddie, what happened to –“ is all he gets out before his vision blanks – a clean white cast, the smell of disinfectant, the seven of them clustered around a hospital bed, and thunder rattling the windowpanes – and then he hears Ben scream.

            _“Oh my God!”_ and “Buh-buh-be _quh-quiet!”_ and Richie shakes himself into the present, noting with some dim horror the corpse whose oozing face he recognizes even now.

            “Cluh-cluh-close the d-door!” Bill hisses, and Richie does it, feeling sick.

“Henry?” He asks, gesturing at the body of their long-time tormentor stiffening on the floor.

            Bev nods grimly, and then grabs a phone book and starts to rifle through it. Bill glances at Ben, who half-raises his arms helplessly in the direction of the body.

            “Yuh-y-you tell,” Bill says to Eddie, tying off the makeshift splint fashioned from what looks like a curtain rod, “Guh-guh-goddamn stutter is g-g-getting w-worse all th-th-the tuh-tuh-time.”

            Richie paces as Eddie starts to speak, pale with pain.

“I – I opened the door – thought it was the bellboy. That’s what he said – the bellboy with a message from your wife. From Myra.” Eddie swallows, his eyes fluttering. “It was _him_ – Henry Bowers, after all this time. He came in here with a knife, attacked me, I broke my arm, and – I killed him,” Eddie finishes in a whisper. His voice gets stronger, and he opens his eyes. “He wasn’t in his right mind. He was thinking about the rockfight. I think – I think It must have been working through him.”

            Richie shudders and then Bev says “Got it!” and she hushes everyone as she dials the phone.

            _Mike,_ Bill mouths, _Library._

“Hello, is mister Hanlon there?” Bev says, and Bill turns, troubled. Richie has time for a panicked thought

_(what the hell happened to Mike if someone else is picking up the phone)_

before Bev is speaking again, in that same voice of perfect calm despair.

            “How badly has he been hurt?” She asks, and then they are all rushing to the phone, silent, hearts hammering. Bill grabs Bev’s hand, Richie puts his hand on top of Bill’s, Ben puts his hand on top of Richie’s, and Eddie shoulders into the circle, his hand on Ben’s and his arm burning warm against Richie’s side.

            She is talking more and more to the voice on the other end of the phone, but it doesn’t seem real until Richie hears, “He really might die?”

            And then he remembers fear.

He calls the hospital after Bev has hung up on the queries of the suspicious police officer, slipping into the role of newspaper reporter as easily as he would put on a new hat. He is on autopilot, cruising through the conversation, and he hangs up and tells them _Alive but grave condition,_ and it’s decided then and there that this must end. They are going to the sewers, to finish whatever they started twenty-seven endless years ago.

            _Only five, only five,_ Richie’s thoughts wail, and he grits his teeth and tries, unsuccessfully, to tell his brain to shut the fuck up as they go down to Eddie’s car, the fog swirling around their feet like gray blood of old ghosts.

            They stop on the Kissing Bridge, collectively pausing for a moment under the barrage of memories – mosquitoes, hundreds of days of dappled summer sunlight, the roar of the Kenduskeag swollen by a thunderstorm, laughs and shouts and the smell of bicycle grease – Eddie sways slightly, pale, and Bev puts a steadying hand on the small of his back before Richie can get there first.

            “T-tuh-take us there, Buh-Ben,” Bill says, and one by one but together they slide down the bank.

            They walk in silence, trying to force through the cat briars, blackberry tangles, and ragweed that have reclaimed their old paths. Water babbles to the left, but it’s eerily muffled in the cottonlike fog. When they reach the sewer entrance the lid is already removed, and the circular mouth of the pipe gapes and drips, salivating like an open mouth.

            “Bill, my arm – can I – ?” Eddie starts to ask, and Bill nods, his eyes glittering.

“We duh-duh-did it once b-before,” He says, not quite darkly but something close, and Richie shudders as Eddie climbs onto Bill’s back and they disappear down the drainpipe; the way Bill said it hangs in the air, reverberating like the gong of a sinister bell.

            They descend into the darkness, the rungs of the narrow ladder slimy with unspeakable things. The reek of sewage punches Richie in the stomach – he breathes through his nose, face twisting in disgust, memories filtering back, of darkness and fear and that fucking _smell._

            “Let’s go,” Bev says bravely, squaring her shoulders, and they turn and start down the tunnel, six inches of cold water lapping at their shins.

            Again, the mirror image of that summer of 1958, it is silent apart from their breathing and Bill occasionally asking Eddie for directions. The scant light from the mouth of the pipe disappears so slowly that it takes them a while to realize it’s gone, and the darker it gets, the worse Richie feels. He guesses it’s just as well that he can’t see anything, because memories keep swelling up like billboards when he does ninety on the highway – not enough time to properly read them, but enough to gather the general impression that he’s fucked about the speed limit. It’s only after they’ve been going about forty minutes, or an hour, or five hours, that Richie gets the full blast of a memory, and he stops dead in the tunnel. He speaks, his voice echoing with a volume that makes them all wince.

            “This was where we fought the Eye,” Richie croaks, and the rest of them stop too under the weight of remembering.

            “Oh fuck, yeah,” Bev says, her voice tremulous, “It got my ear, remember? Almost ripped it off my head.”

            “You were the one who got It, Eddie,” Richie says, and he can sense more than see Bill nod in agreement. “Sprayed it with your inhaler, and said something about a dance. Pretty chuckalicious, but I can’t remember what it was.”

            “I remember that,” Eddie agrees, his voice faint, “but we need to go left. I – “ He pauses for a second, and Richie can hear the fear creeping into his voice under the determination. “We don’t have that much time. We’re lucky It’s not here already.”

            They move on. The tunnels begin to get smaller until all five of them are doubled over in an awkward, stooping crouch, eventually dropping to their knees to fight through the current of graywater, and Richie feels as if he’s shrinking, returning to a summer when he stood at five-six and weighed in at about eighty pounds – his adult coordination is strange when he expects knobbly knees, the part of the tunnel they pass where he remembers with blinding clarity banging his elbow twenty-seven years prior.

            Through the strangeness of that long crawl, he remembers. The missing parts of his childhood seem to drift and surface, like long-buried bodies disturbed and finally rising to the top of a greasy lake – the werewolf and the fight on Neibolt Street, Bev’s face pale and shaky but brave nonetheless in the cherry-light of her cigarette, Stan crying in the Kenduskeag with a trail of blood tracing the lifeline on his palm, Eddie in the hospital looking cheese-pale against the white sheets, and, later, his teeth gritted in futile concentration as he tried to keep his cast out of the water. Richie remembers the day they searched the sewers that thunderous summer, Henry Bowers, Belch Huggins, and Victor Criss blundering through the woods behind them as lethal and stupid as rampaging moose. He remembers Vic and Belch’s distant screams as they were ripped apart in the tunnels, and the brittle jumble of children’s bones. He remembers a chamber with an endless ceiling, dark shadows that seemed to jump and writhe and roil under an insane greenish light, and he remembers a stone floor covered in eons of blood and grime. He remembers It.

            The more he remembers, the more Richie can feel Its fearful power surrounding them, inundating the tunnels like an animal’s musk rubbed into the walls of its den. His heart is rising in the back of his mouth, cold dread prickling up the flesh of his stomach and shaking down his vertebrae. He keeps going, pushing blindly ahead, and then he hears Bill shout, a tumble and a dry _thud._

            “Eddie, stuh-stuh-stop! It ends h-huh-h-here,” Bill says distantly, echoing, and Richie hears the others hopping down to the dry floor of the chamber ahead. His tongue feels swollen, clumsy, his eyeballs pounding with the terrified force of his pulse.

            He hops down and hears Ben do the same behind him, and he can see again – the light is there, seeming indescribably far away, pulsing and muted like lightning shocks behind thunderheads. His friends look like children but also terribly like corpses, their wrinkles and somehow their _adult-ness_ smoothed away in the sickly light, pale, eyes ringed with bruiselike black and mouths set in determination.

            Richie breathes.

“Th-th-the d-d-d-door,” Bill says, quietly, and they all swivel, slow with dread, to face the tiny door at the end of the enormous room. As they advance abreast, a five-person army, Richie makes out the mark on the door, floating up black against the ancient cracked wood. To him, it looks like a puddle of blood.

            They stop outside the door, and the air is thrumming with things unspeakable. Ben takes a deep breath and reaches out. They close the circle unthinkingly, perfectly. Richie’s palm tingles and hums.

            “Whatever happens down here, I love you guys. I, uh – I guess I just wanted you to know that,” Ben says, and Richie feels a rush of gratitude, love rising in him like a wave.

            “We love you too, Ben,” Bev replies, and something in her voice makes Ben flush – _That’s just like the old days, too._

            “You have such a way with words, Haystack,” Richie says, “you should’ve been the writer.”

            Bill lets out a startled bark of laughter, Ben smiles abashedly, and Eddie huffs silently from Bev’s side. They feel something in the air, an electric sort of _quiver –_ something recoiling from the sound of their laughter as a blind and hairless cave creature would squirm from the warmth of a flame.

            They break apart to cluster behind Bill; without preface he opens the door and they enter the realm of It.

            It is as awful as Richie nearly remembered. The final cobwebs are blasted off his memory, a cacophony of horror rises like violin strings shrieking in discordant tandem; numerous broken-necked bodies still hang from the ceiling, swaddled like some sick parallel to infancy, to be nursed, drained, eaten, and discarded. There are smatters of bone and dry blood on the floor, remains of children long stolen, and Bill’s face twists with pain remembering Georgie and all the other ghosts of that summer. He screams, his voice reverberating with the treble of madness.

            _“CUH-CUH-COME OUT, YOU FUH-FUH-FUH-FUCK! YOU K-KILLED MY BUH-BRUH-BROTHER!”_ He roars, and Richie sees the gleam of Its eyes far above them before It descends with dizzying speed, scuttling down the center of its domed web like something from a nightmare, and It charges Bill as Bill charges It, and once again after twenty-seven years they clash into stillness at the very center of the room. The Ritual Of Chüd begins with that perfect, eerie silence, that all-encompassing power and that tingling fear they can feel in the air once again.

            The rest of them gather around Bill, sentinels in that screaming quiet, watching ceaselessly for endless minutes as the tension spills over and the battle plays out far, far away.

            They stand for what could have been hours before Bill stirs, and even before Ben opens his mouth to gasp Richie knows something is wrong. Bill’s face is _slackening,_ elongating like warm putty, his eyes rolling back in his head as he sinks to the floor, and Richie thinks he can hear a faraway scream of triumph as Its flanks begin to twitch and shiver.

            _“HELP HIM!”_ Bev shouts, surging forward with fists raised as It awakens, but Richie is already jumping to Bill and grabbing his wrist, and instantly he feels himself go _up_ – he is flying from his body with all the speed and slowness of a dying star.

            He is surrounded, moving through a void that pulsates with alternations of black and dull red, like what he sees under his closed eyelids in a dark room. Richie can tell, somehow, that direction no longer exists; beyond, behind, or inside the formless colors he can sense things bigger than his mind can wrap around, comprised of more mass than the sky or the moon or the Earth but not physically existing at all. He feels layers of his conscious mind peeling away under the speed with which he’s hurtling through this nowhere universe. He grasps for something that will force his brain to stay, and absurdly, produces a song – the Ramones jabber in his head, _twenty-twenty-twenty-four-hours-ago-o-o_ – Richie laughs, shrill and hysterical, and this sound that only exists in his brain scares him back into himself.

            _!!!!!BILL!!!!!_

He can’t speak, so he pushes this thought out with all the force he can muster, pictures launching it like a rocket streaming plumes of fire, and he feels it outstrip him, traveling towards some undefinable and horrific _edge._

            - _richie-? -_

He hears Bill, or rather senses Bill – the thought comes weakly, desperately, and Richie sees what is rising before him. It isn’t anything. It is the opposite of everything he understands – it is the absence of everything, a great _neutrality_ that is both indescribably dark and emitting endless amounts of light, and it is against this looming empty backdrop of dark matter or void or heavenly insanity that Richie sees Bill and sees It.

            They are glowing, light and the absence, not physical but tangible, and as Richie approaches he thinks _Chüd_ and sees that they are intertwined, battling, tongues streaming blood energy that, on Bill’s side, is waning.

            Richie thinks, _Okay,_ and he joins Bill, a scream of light, an intangible massless mass of particles assembled into something he can’t understand, and he does what he always does when he can’t understand something: he starts to laugh.

            _!!!NO!!!_

He hears It recoil from his laughter, giving a protesting scream, and he jumps forward, feeling his absence-of-a-mouth stretching, his very mind quivering with laughter that trembles on the brink of a scream –

            _!!!!!STOP!!!!!_

Richie intertwines with Bill and begins to pull him away from the edge at the same time that he sinks whatever he understands to be teeth – his laughter, perhaps, or his fury – into Its writhing and senseless tongue. It screams in agony at the fresh energy of this challenger, and as Richie fights he tastes blood and something worse, something _more –_ copper, sulfur, the anomaly of feeling something so scorchingly hot your skin perceives it as cold – and they are slowly, slowly gathering momentum, the three of them dragging then pulling then hurtling then careening back towards their bodies, back towards themselves, and every moment they go Richie can feel It weakening –

            _\- can’t go back to a body it doesn’t have -_ Bill whispers, and Richie sends frantic hope out around him in a starburst, through the screaming pain of Its teeth needling in his tongue, _oh please oh fucking please let them be killing It let them rip It apart let them end It, end It, END IT –_

\- and then he tumbles to the floor, barking his elbow on the stone, and he curses with breath he doesn’t have in him among the shouts and screams of the war-bound, echoing through the cavern with vivid realness, the wet crunches of a carapace breaking, meat and ichor spilling on the floor in ritual sacrifice –

\- Richie closes his eyes, and when he opens them again Eddie is there.

At first, his mind doesn’t comprehend what his eyes are telling it

( _that’s eddie that’s eddie spaghetti on the floor and his arm is gone his arm is gone do you understand how much blood his arm is g)_

and he simply stares, his eyes flicking between the socket and the still face like a very young child trying to grasp where the bird went after watching it fly away. Then an image comes to him – a memory of trying to catch lizards one summer day, kneeling on the baking hot stones in the garden, and as one came by he’d brought his glass jar down with the quickness of a guillotine, neatly chopping off the lizard’s tail. It had held the same blank emptiness, the same quick spurt of bright lifeblood, and as Richie sees this he feels his heart give several dozen condensed beats in the space of a second – _badumbadumbadumbadum –_ and a walloping numbness starts to spread from the center of his chest, as if he’d been hit with a rock.

“Eds,” He whispers, _“Eddie?”_ He crawls to Eddie’s side. He can’t feel his lips move, but he hears the sound they make. He reaches out with glacial slowness and pulls Eddie onto his lap.

He smiles, relieved, when Eddie’s eyes open.

“Hey, Spaghetti-Man.” He says this like the hundreds of summer days he’d said it before, and after a few seconds Eddie focuses on him from somewhere far away. His eyes look very green. His eyelashes –

            “Richie,” Eddie coughs, and the way it burbles deep in his chest makes Richie understand, with another icy wallop, that he will not survive.

            “It’s gonna be okay, Eddie,” Richie says with that same drifting slowness. Strangely, his eyes are blurring, and he wonders vaguely if his glasses are broken before he realizes that the warm drips falling on Eddie’s face are tears.

            “I’m – fine,” Eddie whispers, “ – can’t see – you – Richie.”

“That’s okay,” Richie says, and his voice quivers, “That’s okay, Eds, don’t worry, you’re golden. We’re gonna get you out of here. I –“

            “ – see the sky – Richie-?” Eddie sighs, and he is smiling, saying Richie’s name with reverence: a talisman, a chant, a celebration song.

            “ _Eds,”_ He chokes, and Eddie’s eyes are slipping out of focus, softening, looking beyond the endless ceiling of the cavern to the dusty glitter of faraway stars.

            “Don’t – call me – Eds,” He exhales this so quietly Richie needs to lean in, and he feels Eddie’s breath, barely warm on his ear, weak as the wing of a dying butterfly. “You – you know I – I – “

            Richie is still waiting for him to finish minutes later when he realizes Eddie is gone.

There is a great, blank silence roaring through him. He leans in, and as he kisses Eddie’s cold lips the very last memory comes to him like a burst of springtime rain. His head snaps back up, eyes wet and vision doubled, and he sits like that long after the others have gathered around him, crying hard and fast and silent, long after Bev has closed Eddie’s eyes, long after Ben has placed a shaking hand on his shoulder, until Bill finally tells him to get up and come home.

            Richie remembers nothing of the walk back through the sewers; he only remembers thinking _I can’t believe we left Eds in all those germs._ He stumbles along with Bill’s arm around his shoulders and Bev’s around his waist, and he takes his memories of Eddie Kaspbrak and inundates them, marks them, fiercely thinks over each one on a loop until he knows he will never forget them – Eddie on the back of his bike, Eddie shushing him during a sleepover, _stop fucking throwing popcorn or i-,_ Eddie laughing through a mouthful of ice cream, Eddie gasping at his inhaler, Eddie rolling his eyes at Richie’s enthusiasm for the first Beatles song on the radio and then grabbing his hands, twirling around the room dancing, _love, love me do-,_ Eddie jumping the quarry cliff silhouetted against the sky, Eddie on the day they built the dam, Eddie’s chin bleeding after the rockfight, Eddie pinching a cigarette from between Richie’s teeth, _every one of these takes eight minutes off your life! eight minutes, richie-,_ Eddie’s resistant cheek pinched between his fingers, Eddie hugging him soft and fierce on the night of his fifteenth birthday.

            By the time they get to Mike’s hospital room, he’s forgotten a little over a quarter of what he swore to always remember – the memories slip out of his grasp the way clouds blow into wisps, disappearing from a temporary spring sky.

            By the time he hugs Ben, Bev, Mike and Bill goodbye, he’s forgotten the color of Eddie’s eyes.

            By the time he flies back to California, after he has thrown away his cracked and far-too-small coke-bottle glasses in a heartbreakingly anonymous airport trashcan, he’s forgotten Eddie’s name.

            By the time he gets back to work the following Monday, he’s forgotten his hometown – when an acquaintance asks where he grew up, he frowns for a moment before laughing and telling her lightly _the middle of nowhere, Maine._

            By the time he changes his calendar, Richie Tozier has forgotten Eddie Kaspbrak completely.

            Once, just once – he is walking down the quiet boardwalk under a riotous sunset when two kids pass him, one working hard to pedal the bike uphill and one balanced precariously on the handlebars. He smiles slightly, a tall, middle-aged man with wild curly hair, a slight slouch in his back, and a distant look in his eyes, and as the kids ride past they give him a furtive glance before electing to ignore him.

            “You suck at riding double,” The handlebar kid laughs, and Richie stops dead

_(you fucking suck at riding double, tozier,)_

_(what was that, - ?)_

_(i said don’t drop me, you asshole)_

            troubled by the whisper of some memory, elusive as a song heard years ago whose name he’d long forgotten.


	7. Chapter 7

The day Richie Tozier kisses Eddie Kaspbrak for the first time is a day he knows he’ll never forget.

            It is spring of 1959, a warm day that starts with gusty wind and a white, fast-moving sky. Richie gets to school with damp hair and no jacket, and Eddie crumples his forehead in exasperation and tells him that he’ll catch pneumonia. Richie ruffles his hair and pinches his cheek and laughs when Eddie shrugs out from under his arm, and spends all day watching the spats of rain bounce playfully off the windows.

            They walk home together, talking about nothing and everything, and when they pass Richie’s favorite climbing tree his eyes light up and he bolts from the sidewalk, Eddie trailing resignedly behind him.

            He swings up easily into the crook of the trunk and the lowest branch, his shoe scraping off crumbles of the wet black bark.

            “How come you’ve never come up here, Eds?” Richie asks, swinging his feet, and Eddie wrinkles his nose. _Cute, cute, cute._

            “Are you kidding? My mom never lets me climb trees.” His eyes darken. Ever since the previous summer, when Eddie discovered his afflictions were induced more by the shrilling of his mother than by poor health, he has disdained the idea of medicine. He is still careful, still clean – _Just ‘cause I don’t have asthma doesn’t mean I can’t catch diseases like anyone else, and you should really wash your hands more, Richie –_ but he carries only band-aids in his pockets and throws away his aspirator. Richie still keeps one, because he likes the color.

            “Well, _she’s_ not here,” Richie says now, “and she remains un-faced with the challenge of this climbing tree.” He lets his words sink in for emphasis, grinning down at Eddie’s serious face below. “I _double-dog-dare_ you.”

            Richie fully expects Eddie to roll his eyes, tell him to stop being an idiot, and get out of the tree before he catches a cold from rainwater and lichen and god knows what else. So when Eddie’s expression slowly rebels, lighting up with a smirk that would have been much more at home on Richie’s face, his heart skips with a little shock of delight.

            “Move the fuck over, then,” Eddie says, and Richie whoops, sliding down into the wet grass.

            “You’ve gotta reach the dead branch,” Richie says, pointing up to where it juts from the trunk like a broken bone. Eddie frowns.

            “Why the dead branch?” He asks, and Richie grins wickedly.

“’Cause it’s high enough that I know you mean it. Also, if you don’t reach it you’re a pussy,” and Eddie shoves him when he cackles, and steps forward to scramble awkwardly up into the tree.

            Richie watches in delight as Eddie climbs – he is conscientious at first, very slow to place his feet, but soon he is reaching for higher and thinner branches with the ease and grace of a little red squirrel. Every time he raises his knee to sock his foot into the crook of the next branch, his pants strain across his butt, and Richie catches himself staring a few too many times before he clears his throat and blinks down at the ground. His ears burn.

            Eddie is almost at the top when Richie looks back up, and when he reaches the dead branch he turns around, his cheeks pink with exertion and his eyes flashing with triumph.

            _“Who’s a pussy now, Rich?”_ He yells distantly, and Richie smiles until he thinks his face will burst, feeling something grow and swell in his chest.

            _“You are, until you get to the top!”_ Richie shouts back, and Eddie gives him the finger, laughing, and then swings his foot up onto the dead branch. As he puts his weight on it, there’s a terrible break, a crack like lightning, and Richie barely has time to catch a glimpse of his terror-pale face before Eddie is slipping from the treetop at the speed of a stone dropped from a skyscraper, grabbing frantically at twigs to try and break his fall, and then he hits a thick branch stomach-first and tumbles the rest of the way a limp and unresisting ragdoll. He is on the ground before Richie can scream, his head bouncing slightly, and then he’s lying so fucking _still_ – he is splayed out like someone dead.

            Richie is dropping to his knees almost before he realizes he’s moved, feeling his pulse beat a frantic staccato from the middle of his head to the tips of his fingers and toes. He grabs Eddie’s face

            _(is he broken oh christ is he breathing)_

in both his hands and tilts it up, thinking his voice is loud but hearing it come out as barely a whisper.

            “Eds,” He croaks, _“Eddie?”_ and his stomach plunges when Eddie doesn’t stir, his face snow white against dark wet earth. He shakes him slightly, back and forth. He remembers a movie he saw where someone revived a man from a faint, but he doesn’t have the heart to slap Eddie’s face. He pats his cheek helplessly instead. It’s ice-cold.

            “Wake up _,_ Kaspbrak,” He says, ignoring the way his voice is quivering. Eddie’s head is heavy, his neck limp. His hand trails off like an unfinished question in the grass. Richie trembles, grabbing for his wrist, and begins to feel for a pulse. He has no idea what else to do.

            Eddie suddenly exhales, his eyelids fluttering half-open, and Richie forgets how to breathe. Relief melts his bones into butter, and Eddie groans slightly, bringing a hand to his head.

            “You fucking _scared_ me, you almost-dead _asshat,”_ is what escapes Richie’s mouth, and Eddie’s eyes fly open. He tries to sit up but sinks back down with a whimper, and Richie pulls his head and shoulders onto his lap.

            “My head,” Eddie mumbles, “God, Richie, _fuck_ you –“ and Richie leans down, screws his eyes shut, and kisses him squarely on the mouth.

            Eddie doesn’t resist, only gives a tiny _mmph_ of what is probably surprise. Richie doesn’t know exactly what to do after the initial smashing together, so he starts moving his lips and his bottom lip ends up between Eddie’s. With a jolt, he realizes he can _taste_ Eddie – a little bit like the milk he had at lunch, sweet and pale, but mostly just like mouth. Eddie’s lips are as chilly as the rest of his face, smooth and cool, and there are butterflies exploding all throughout Richie’s midsection, like his guts have turned to some nature documentary with zillions of orange-and-black monarchs filling the sky –

            Eddie shoves at Richie’s chest with both hands and sits up, wiping at his mouth. His eyes are wide, still filmy with confusion, and Richie can only sit there, his own mouth half-open and his whole face tingling.

            “Either I’m a lot more concussed than I thought, or you – you just – “ Eddie speaks slowly, with forced calm, and Richie is scrambling, desperate for an escape because _holy fucking hell he just kissed his best friend – his very male best friend – he just kissed Eddie_ and, his brain whispers smugly, _Eddie kissed back._

“Just some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Eds,” Richie hears himself say, his voice loathsomely casual, and he curses himself for taking the coward’s way out as he adds, “I wouldn’t want you to die without having had a chance to see me locked in sweet, sweet embrace with your m –“

            Richie is cut off effectively by Eddie’s lips on his. His brain seems to be short-circuiting – for once it is quiet, roaring with shock instead of reciting jokes or songs or buzzing on about things he sees around him. Eddie pulls back again before Richie has a chance to close his eyes. He is pale no longer – his entire face is flushed a sweet pink, the color of unripe strawberries in June.

            “Shut up, Richie,” Eddie says fiercely, and for once Richie gladly complies.

Eventually, when Eddie can stand without feeling dizzy, they get up and walk together under the endless sky of that spring. Richie reaches up every so often to touch his tingling lips, and he thinks he should feel weirder about his first kiss, but he just looks at Eddie and is happy.

They will never speak of it again, but Richie always remembered that day, especially the way the clouds blew over on their way home: gathering into wisps at first, then disappearing so gradually that they didn’t notice it happen – they just looked up and saw the perfect blue of a temporary springtime sky.

**Author's Note:**

> EDIT: heyo i have a tumblr for reddie stuff now and i'm taking requests !! so if you wanna leave me a prompt i'll write it for you and post it on here and also on my blog - reddie-to-write.tumblr.com


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